I used to aspire to 10 minutes a day; now I blog conference presentations and the occasional reflection.

Friday, May 21, 2010

First panel, CW 2010

I attended a couple of workshops yesterday, but didn't get around to blogging. I've used my blog for conference notes more than anything else in the last couple of years--might as well keep up the tradition.

Madeline Sorapure, "Seeing Writing: Interactive Text Visualization in Pedagogy and Research." She is continuing her research on data visualization. She started with Worlde, but showed us various comparative strategies that could make Wordle a better analytical tool--Obama's inauguration compared to last 5, abstracts from CCCC by area. Showed a data visualization of alice in Wonderland, then an affect bar, which measure affect in text based on established affective responses to words. Parts of speech coding; docuburst diagram with root word; aesethetic visualization.

Bottom line question: does computational analysis and data visualization help us find / understand common roots of text / image communication?

Maggie Christensen, "Can you taste this project, please? Synesthesia in Multimodal Composing." Replacing synesthesia with "intermodal"--learn how senses inform compositional choices. Intermodality the current psychological term for understanding how all our senses (and emotion, intellect, etc.) interact in meaning making. Working multimodally implies working with multiple media; working intermodally pays attention to wider synesthesia of medium, emotion, intellect. "If your favorite technology were a dessert, what would it be and why?" Interested in working with the ineffable, understanding the ineffable.

William Burdette, "Unfit for Print: Composition as Sound." Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How you Make It--a text worth checking out. Critiques our passion for matter; we are waves and particles; who we are today is not who we were. If we are waves, how do we write like one? 1. recording sounds is sound writing. sound writing is old and efficient. 2. we can learn from audio recording: paving a way and retracing a path coincide. sound writing is mobile. 3. We might try to regulate sound writing. What sounds like class to one person might sound like class to another. Modernization created noise by attempting to limit.